ORA-01801: Date Format is Too Long for Internal Buffer

Expert Oracle Database Tips by Donald BurlesonFebruary 15, 2015

Question:
I am using a query to fetch records from a table in a iterative manner. In
this situation, let's say the
table has 600 records but it's able to fetch only 599 records. For the
last record I am getting the following error:

ORA-01801: date format is too long for
internal buffer.

I checked the DB for the date format and it is the same for all
the records, so why
am I
getting this error for one record only and other 599 records are
getting processed successfully?

Could anyone help me to understand why I am getting the ORA-01801 error?

Answer:
To diagnose any
error, you start by using the
oerr utility to display the ORA-01801 error:

ORA-01801: date
format is too long for internal buffer

Cause:
The date format string was too long to process. This should occur only if
several long literals are specified as part of a date.

Action:
Remove long literals from the date format string.

It sounds like a bad piece of data was added to your table. Do you have any way
to determine which record is the bad record? If you can identify the bad
record, you might be able to update the date value to a valid value or null it
out without actually reading what the value is.

If you are doing a to_char on the field, try selecting just the column name
instead of to_char(column_name).

You can usually resolve this type of issue, but it takes some time and patience.

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